Statements about a public official’s conduct in public office imputing the commission of crime, dishonesty, or corruption are clearly defamatory.
Usually, once defamation is shown, the person who made the claim has to show it is true to avoid accountability. What the New York Times Co. case did was shift the burden to the public officials to prove that a “news” outlet knew its claim was false or it recklessly disregarded whether it was true.
If a “news” outlet claims its false accusations of crime, dishonesty or corruption were the result of stupidity, ignorance, sloppy news gathering, rumor mongering, or "just my opinion", the defamed public official must prove the publication was a calculated falsehood or lie "knowingly and deliberately published," or the product of the publisher's imagination, or was so inherently improbable that only a reckless person would have put it in circulation, or that the publisher had obvious reason to distrust the accuracy of the alleged defamatory statement or the reliability of the source of the statement.
Traditional wisdom has always been for public officials to suffer through false accusations -- after all, who can win against someone who buys ink by the barrel or has access to a microphone without restriction and is protected even when being an irresponsible journalist. I wonder.